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RESEARCH NEWS EDUCATION NEWS RECRUITING NEWS Textile and Apparel Management CONFERENCES |
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 Mission
Statement To establish a high quality forum relevant to the needs of global industry and higher education that will provide leadership in the timely dissemination of information dealing with all aspects of textile and apparel, technology and management. |
IFAI and APICS 2003 Conferences
Las Vegas,
Nevada
George Hodge, Associate Professor
IFAI
Two conferences of interest to textile executives were held in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 2003. First, the Industrial Fabrics Association International (IFAI) conference (October 1-3, 2003) featured speakers discussing applications of textiles in automotive, home furnishing, medicine, protective clothing, and sporting goods. Exhibitors were presenting a variety of specialty textile products, but the main observation was that many of the exhibitors were US based companies. Milliken was showing a number of products that were for custom engineered applications and Glen Raven featured several new residential and marine fabric designs. JHRG LLC featured Supreme Protector® an extremely light and strong fabric with marine, military, and many other applications. Shuford Mills was featuring their Outdura™ fabrics. Deroyal Textiles, Shamut Mills, Avondale Mills and Rhode Island Textile Company were other US based manufacturing companies exhibiting at the conference. Approximately 7,400 attendees with 480 exhibitors. For more information on IFAI and future conferences start with www.IFAI.com.
APICS
The 2003 Educational Society for Resource Management (APICS), International Conference and Exposition was held October 5-9, 2003. The conference theme ‘Transforming Challenges into Opportunities’ is especially pertinent to today’s textile industry. Bob Beecy, Director of Planning at Dan River, Inc. presented their experiences with implementing lean manufacturing. He said “If companies accept the philosophies and techniques of lean, while minding culture of their organization, they should achieve a level of success that spurs further action.” Jeff Agar and John Schroeter presented “Tackling Tough Supply Chains”, a discussion of Steelcase, Inc., a designer and manufacturer of workplace environments. They discussed the difficulties in working in the textile fabric supply chain to provide office furniture. There were 100 educational sessions on such topics as demand forecasting, enterprise resource planning, sales and operations planning, six sigma, supply chain management, and theory of constrains. The exhibition hall included companies such as Camstar, IBM, Made2Manage Systems, Manugistics, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAS Institute. Over 3500 people attended the conference and approximately 125 vendors participated in the exposition. APICS, The Educational Society for Resource Management, has over 60,000 members world wide. The Textile & Apparel Specific Industry Group (TA SIG) of APICS discusses industry concerns and provides textile specific educational materials. For information on future conferences start with www.APICS.org.
New ideas on textile products and the methods and tools for managing enterprise resources that were presented at these two outstanding conferences provide strategic insights and new directions for textile executives!
College
of Textiles
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